The Ideas of Mr. April

Illustrations by Vladimír Fuka for "Nápady pana Apríla" by Jiří Kolář (Prague, 1961) After scanning this book the other night, I Googled Vladimír Fuka (1926–1977) and found that he's "in the news" for the recently unearthed (it was lost in an attic!) book New York: A Mod Portrait of the City. I will need to buy that immediately. Fuka won many illustration and design awards (he was also a painter and sculptor). He immigrated to the United States in 1967 and became a US citizen in 1973. (See some more work at Terry Posters.) You can read about Jiří Kolář (1914–2002) at wikipedia. I had only known Kolář for his collages, but he started out as a poet. Fuka and Kolář worked on a few children's books together, most famously Seventh Heaven (1964, awarded a gold medal at Bologna). You can see images from Seventh Heaven at Albatros. I'm not sure about my translation of the title. Bing suggests "The Ideas of Mr. April Fools." I've previously done features for But Does it Float on book designs by Fuka (via Bustbright) and collages by Kolář. back endpaper An image from a Czech bookstore shows an envelope pasted on the right back endpaper. My copy has no envelope. Anyone know what's in it? Are they cut-up illustrations which you lay over the illustrations to change them?front endpaperscover Please visit the archives for Czech books illustrated by Hoffmeister, Pacovska, Serych, Stepan, Bednarova, and friends. This post first appeared on April 22, 2014 on 50 Watts